Books on the topic 'Evangelical Presbyterian Church of South Africa'

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.

This chapter describes the importance of indigenous and indigenizing preachers in various parts of the Majority World for the emergence of global Christianity. Indigenous preachers, raised in the swaddling clothes of missionary Christianity, left the garments behind to present the message of Christ in hues and tones more suited to non-Enlightenment cosmologies. Case studies include William Wadé Harris (‘The Black Elijah’), who subverted British colonial religion and rule by conducting an extensive anti-fetish campaign throughout parts of West Africa; David Yonggi Cho, who by incorporating and redefining Korean minjung founded the largest church in the world in South Korea; and C. René Padilla’s Misión Integral, which arose as an evangelical response to materialist liberation theologies in South America. The chapter notes the value of indigenous cultures in the rise and character of indigenized Christianity.

The dramatic growth of Christianity in the Global South over the last century has shifted the balance of power away from strongholds in Europe and the United States. While we typically imagine religion traveling from West to East and from North to South, David R. Swartz shows that lines of influence also run in other directions. Missionaries and non-Western evangelicals have shaped the American evangelical church. On issues of race, economics, human rights, and social justice, these complex transnational relationships often feature accommodation and mutuality, and they often push toward cosmopolitan sensibilities among elite and establishment evangelicals. But they also feature resistance among American evangelical populists, many of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And on issues of sexuality and the supernatural, they draw sustenance from the Global South. This geographically expansive book, which spans Asia, Africa, and South America, offers new insights into a tradition that imagines itself as both American and part of a global communion. It considers how evangelical networks not only go out to, but also come from, the ends of the earth.

Presbyterians and Congregationalists arrived in colonial America as Dissenters; however, they soon exercised a religious and cultural dominance that extended well into the first half of the nineteenth century. The multi-faceted Second Great Awakening led within the Reformed camp by the Presbyterian James McGready in Kentucky, a host of New Divinity ministers in New England, and Congregationalist Charles Finney in New York energized Christians to improve society (Congregational and Presbyterian women were crucial to the three most important reform movements of the nineteenth century—antislavery, temperance, and missions) and extend the evangelical message around the world. Although outnumbered by other Protestant denominations by mid-century, Presbyterians and Congregationalists nevertheless expanded geographically, increased in absolute numbers, spread the Gospel at home and abroad, created enduring institutions, and continued to dominate formal religious thought. The overall trajectory of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism and Congregationalism in the United States is one that tracks from convergence to divergence, from cooperative endeavours and mutual interests in the first half the nineteenth century to an increasingly self-conscious denominational awareness that became firmly established in both denominations by the 1850s. With regional distribution of Congregationalists in the North and Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic region and South, the Civil War intensified their differences (and also divided Presbyterians into antislavery northern and pro-slavery southern parties). By the post-Civil War period these denominations had for the most part gone their separate ways. However, apart from the southern Presbyterians, who remained consciously committed to conservatism, they faced a similar host of social and intellectual challenges, including higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolutionary theory, to which they responded in varying ways. In general, Presbyterians maintained a conservative theological posture whereas Congregationalists accommodated to the challenges of modernity. At the turn of the century Congregationalists and Presbyterians continued to influence sectors of American life but their days of cultural hegemony were long past. In contrast to the nineteenth-century history of Presbyterian and Congregational churches in the United States, the Canadian story witnessed divergence evolving towards convergence and self-conscious denominationalism to ecclesiastical cooperation. During the very years when American Presbyterians were fragmenting over first theology, then slavery, and finally sectional conflict, political leaders in all regions of Canada entered negotiations aimed at establishing the Dominion of Canada, which were finalized in 1867. The new Dominion enjoyed the strong support of leading Canadian Presbyterians who saw in political confederation a model for uniting the many Presbyterian churches that Scotland’s fractious history had bequeathed to British North America. In 1875, the four largest Presbyterian denominations joined together as the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The unifying and mediating instincts of nineteenth-century Canadian Presbyterianism contributed to forces that in 1925 led two-thirds of Canadian Presbyterians (and almost 90 per cent of their ministers) into the United Church, Canada’s grand experiment in institutional ecumenism. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congregationalism had only a slight presence, whereas Presbyterians, by contrast, became increasingly more important until they stood at the centre of Canada’s Protestant history.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, alumni and students from historically black colleges and universities contributed to the American Protestant mission movement in West Africa. Those contributions extended beyond the manual labor endeavors promoted by Booker T. Washington and the Phelps Stokes Fund; African American missionaries also adapted classical studies and self-help ideology to a transnational context. This book analyzes the effects and significance of black education strategies through the ministries of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston from 1902 to 1941. Brown specialized in language, music, and cultural analysis while her husband engaged in preaching, agricultural research, and mediation on behalf of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in what became the Belgian Congo. Personal and professional partnership motivated the two missionaries to interpret their responsibilities as a combination of training from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Stillman Institute. Each of these institutions held a symbolic meaning in the contexts of the Southern Presbyterian Church and European colonialism in Africa. Denominational administrators and colonial officials understood African American missionaries as leaders with the potential to challenge racial hierarchies. This perception influenced the shifting relations between African Christians and black missionaries during the development of village churches. The Edmistons’ pedagogical interest in adapting to local conditions encouraged Presbyterian converts and students to promote their interests and their authority within the Congo Mission. At the same time, occasional segregation and expulsion of African American missionaries from overseas ministry enabled them to influence early civil rights activities in the American South.